Carlos Rambaldi

If you were enthralled by the diminutive, charming protagonist of Steven Spielberg’s E.T., the towering ape in the 1976 remake of King Kong, or the hideous, homicidal beast in Ridley Scott’s Alien, thank Carlo Rambaldi. Rambaldi, a special-effects wizard who died Aug. 10 at age 86 in his native Italy, won Academy Awards for visual effects for all three of those films. Spielberg hailed Rambaldi as “E.T.’s Geppetto,” a reference to the fictional woodcarver who created Pinocchio, but Rambaldi’s skills …